Even as a kid I knew there was something just wrong about A Bad Case of Stripes

It gave me a weird feeling as a kid too, and I think it's a combination of the illustration style and the subject matter.

David Shannon has such a particular, oil painting esque style. Most of his illustrations are very cartoony, like his iconic No David books:

Like look at that! The features and proportions are exaggerated! Full of bright colors! Reminiscent of something a kid might draw.

But then there's A Bad Case of Stripes. In this book Shannon seems to lean much more into the realm of surrealism, and the result is...

...uncanny. I mean look at those faces!!! Nothing like the caricature bulbous head of little David. These guys look like they crawled out of a Renaissance painting! Look at the shading!!! It looks like you could reach out and touch those little fuzzy blue pompoms! Which brings me to my next point...

A Bad Case of Stripes is just... kid-friendly body horror. There's no gore in it, but what this girl goes through is something straight out of a fever induced nightmare.

Just like those creepy realistic renders of what Patrick Star or Homer Simpson would look like in real life (remember those?) It's the realism, the 3d look, the impeccable shading that makes Stripes so damn creepy. In a more cartoonish style, Stripes probably would've been a wacky little kids book. But because of how realistic the illustrations are...

...We wound up with the suppressed birthplace of body horror phobias for generations to come.

Ask your neighbors if they've seen this too! If the stairs make any kind of architectural sense, they'd presumably also connect to the closets of the people directly below you.

I don't really know any of my neighbors. I just moved here in 2021 and everybody was still pretty holed up from the pandemic. I moved here to be close to a friend, and then she got a new job and moved away. I like my apartment, so I haven't wanted to move, but I don't have a lot of people I know here, and most of them are just friends of my friend, so I'm not particularly close to them. That's why I had so much trouble deciding who to talk to about this staircase thing, because I'm not really close to anybody here. I even work remotely, so most of my co-workers are in a different state!

I eventually decided on talking to Katie about it. She's someone I met at a local swing dancing event a few months ago (Yes, I know: crochet? swing dancing? I'm a nerd.) We hit it off and we've hung out a few times since then. Anyway, I messaged her and we arranged to go out for breakfast tomorrow morning (she was busy tonight--a date, lucky bum!). I'll tell her about it then and see if she'll believe me.

Meanwhile, I took people's advice and talked to the maintenance guys. Specifically, I talked to one maintenance guy, Carter, who has apparently worked here for decades. I asked him a bit about the history of the building. He said it was built in the 60s and it was originally a hotel.

Here's the lobby:

(sorry about the smeary camera lens)

Interesting fact: it turns out that the 7th floor, where I live, was not original to the building! It was added on later. You can kind of tell when you look at the photo from the outside:

There's that ledge between the top (seventh) floor and the next floor down.

But there's still no possible way for those stairs to be there. When you look at them through the stairway door, they go straight out the wall before curving around. That means that there would be an externally visible stairwell sticking out from the wall, and you can see that there isn't one.

I tried asking Carter about it anyway. I'm sure my face was bright red, but I started telling him about "a friend of mine who found an old boarded-up stairway in her apartment building" and asked him if anybody had ever found something like that here. He laughed and said no, and added that he knew every nook and cranny of the building, including the elevator shafts, the attics, the roof, and the little cubbies in the hall that open up so they can access the bathroom plumbing in the rooms when something breaks. If there was anything resembling a secret stair, he'd know about it.

I guess he just doesn't know anything about a stair that according to the laws of physics, couldn't actually be there.

“either sonic is a god or could kill god, and i do not CARE if there is a difference” hits a lot different after getting into sonic fr

With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm - The Kingston Trio

Some fan art of my favorite creepypastas from Hazel and Mae’s normal creepypasta retrospective video

Hope to make more in the future if this does well

a short list of things I've convinced other people of:

- the word "phenome" is pronounced "fen-oh-me"

- the channel LOGO is actually an acronym for "lots of gay orgies"

- I got separated from my family while hiking as a kid and was raised by wolves for three years

- the Croissant Belt is a region of France that produces significant numbers of pastries (kind of like the Rust Belt in the US)

- I lack impulse control because my amygdala never fully developed

Since I got into star trek I understand what people mean by seeing things through the lense of your special interest/ it being important to how you conceptualize things

Autists and star trek are really meant to go together. It's just like spongebob

for all you know btw i could be lying i could be a fake person not real except some of you you’ve met me we went to mcr together i think

Ya know if delusions and magical thinking and detachment from reality weren’t fucking horrifying (in my experience), I would not get help lol I’d much rather think some crazy shit if it was better than real life. Ppl can trip on shrooms n nobody blinks an eye, but have a positive experience w psychosis and society goes wild

i just started reading the book House of Leaves and i’ve gotta say in this post-goncharov world the premise of the book is very funny bc like yea that happened irl

lol does yr brain ever just suddenly present you with an image of some nascent gay little impulse from yr youth in a frame that says caustically ‘you dumbass’ or is that one just me

why not have a nice juicy gelled cheese sandwich

Dude I'm lactose-intolerant

Goncharov Lives!

To wit, I saw some soundtrack compositions, trailers, and retrospectives on YouTube--which may be new only to me. The sound--and the look!--is amazing, top tier, no notes. Holy mackerel (anchovy?), boys, we're doing it!

had a dream last night. no one asked but I'm telling you all anyways. warnings in the tags.

I think someone had captured a coworker of mine and I was trying to save them? But for whatever reason I was in a city, a grey and vaguely apocalyptic city. I am in a deserted street or alley, and I take a seat on a grungy weather-worn wooden chair to read an article on my tablet. (Why I have wifi here, I do not know. Why I have my iPad at all, I do not know.) I look over and sitting on the edge of the seat across from me is a ghastly skeletal monster, the bones of its hands held together by tight grey papery skin stretched between them like webbing, and enormous darkly-shadowed holes for eyes. It sees me as I sit, and I avoid their eyes out of some combination of fear and politeness. There are creatures in this city, and while I have chanced to meet very few, I know there's no reason to believe it is malicious based on its appearance. So I I cross my legs in a triangle, lean back, and turn my attention to the article on my screen.

In my secondary vision, I see the skeletal creature move, and position itself in front of me, its face framed above my screen. It stands there, impossibly still. Watching. Waiting.

Seeing as this is both deeply rude and deeply unsettling, I shift in my seat, as casually as possible, so the tablet blocks my view of the creatures face. Perhaps it thinks I have sit nearby because I want to talk, which I very much do not. No offense to them, but I've got things to read and people to save.

The creature quietly shifts to the side with inhuman smoothness, so it stands in the left of my field of vision. It's still a few feet away, but it seems closer, somehow. More of a threat. Daring me to make eye-contact. Again, I quietly shift my position in my seat, as if merely trying to get comfortable, and turn myself to the creature, positioning my screen directly in front of it so I can no longer see it.

I blink.

The creature is closer.

I try to force my eyes to read the screen but I can't focus, my heart pounds and my breath quickens. I blink again. The creature, without having moved, is suddenly closer yet.

I blink again.

Bone-white skeletal claws come crashing around the edged of my screen, ready to fling it out of the way to meet my eyes and do whatever such creatures do with those who they chose to do things to.

There is a sudden t h u m p .

A tall, ill-kempt bald man in old, worn-out clothes stands before me. He appears to have slammed a large chunk of cement into the skeletal creature's head. The creature itself does not bear visible injury, but is certainly unconscious and crumpled to the ground in a dramatic manner. I can't begin to guess if it is dead, seeing as it appears to have been dead to begin with.

Those around me (there are now people around me, somehow, despite the street having been empty moments before) all praise the man for his valor in saving me, hailing him as a hero, the sort of hero-hailing that is forgotten by the next afternoon. The man tiredly raises a hand to those who approach them, not in humility, but in genuine to desire for them to stop. He wearily explains, somewhere between frustrated and pleading, that there are remedies and repellants for aggressive undead available at grocery stores. You can pick up a gum-like substance made from various herbs at your local Meijer for ten buck and carry it with you in a leather pouch to Avoid this Whole Debacle, so he wouldn't Need to play hero and save anyone. There's no Reason for any of this! It's all very simple! He explains in the way of a customers service worker who is just too tired to get angry. I can't express the defeated, desperate exhaustion of this man.

The man picks up his dusty duffel and leaves. I carry on my way. I hope I thanked him. I think I find my friend eventually, having escaped an unethical experimentation facility. And I presume we would have returned to work at the apocalyptic Tim Horton's meeting the next day, had I not woken up.

Ok but I love Barbie’s opening scene because the 2001 homage could’ve so easily been a shallow gag where the whole joke is “get the reference?” but instead it’s priming you for how completely literal the Barbie-as-Monolith idea is to the movie’s themes and conflict.

Seeing the movie I was a little caught off guard by just how unreal the “real world” was both in and out of how people specifically reacted to Barbie’s presence, but in retrospect the opening counts on an understanding of 2001 to immediately say

“This isn’t just an alt universe where Barbieland exists adjacent to reality, but one where Barbie is without exaggeration a primordial cosmic force the discovery of which fundamentally altered how human beings think and evolve.”

The Monolith as a visual metaphor for Barbie’s impact on the world is already a clever little bit of observational comedy, but taking the scene beyond metaphor and into the literal text of the film, to where Barbie’s presence as this reality-shaping object of import is just taken as a given by everyone in the film, that’s freakin genius.

It’s rare to see such an overt reference to another piece of media end up being such a smart and pivotal bit of actual storytelling, and its fascinating to see the film explore “what if humanity’s relationship to the Monolith was reciprocal and the Monolith was actually a Person?”

the poetics of sp's involvement in 1863rd is just ... there's no words to capture the how retrospectively tragic it is. sp is the oldest being in the story. his tragedy has stopped being told but the story was still continuing off the page, years and years and even more unending years of being trapped without resolution, blocked behind the wall. he wants to die but cannot.

hsy's plan was to make 1863 yjh sleep forever. while it is not true death obviously, it will have been the closest to death any yjh has ever gotten (besides 0th who still turned away from it). not death, not regression, but sleep. it is only the domain of the dreams that will let him escape the cruel reality of his unreality and the silent god who will continue to watch over him forever so long as it was this man, yjh.

an important recurring symbol/motif in orv is dreams and there are several important themes linked to dreams i want to discuss.

first one is pretty obvious: dreams as escapism, as a way to desperately wish for a better life, wanting desperately to be saved from a ruined world. ala 1863rd yjh's wish for death and the oldest dream's wish for the characters to become real, to save him. as such, dreams represent a desperate plea for salvation.

and this might be a reach but i would still like to argue that it is the character's belief of their own hopelessness that lead to dreams but also perpetuates an unending cycle. wanting to be saved but also not being able to believe that you're worthy of being saved, that nothing / no one would / should save you. this duality is what leads me to the second theme: in their endless cycle being trapped and neither dead nor living, dreams are but another form of regression.

kdj becomes the oldest dream, the willing lonely god who could only ever dream of everyone's happiness but his own. he had seperated himself from ever reaching out and watching 1864th worldline where all his loved ones are and where he knows he would have been tempted to return. so symbolically, he interferes with 0th yjh and, as his stardusts falls away, he watches all the regressions and yjh. always yjh. his dream. in the end, the train that traps him is himself.

but a final point i want to touch on is this:

it is only when they get off the train and reach their epilogue, does sp finally achieve liberation, does the oldest dream finally end (become free). the dream has ended and into the waking cruel world, they become characters no longer having found each other at last. this was sp's ■■. and that's what i meant by the poetics of it all. the happiest, gentlest of epilogues: the ending of the oldest dream.